


i’ve heard stranger things

by dearzoemurphy



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Post-Finale, kind of how I see Jeff and Britta reacting after all of their closest friends had left, self indulgent angst, teeny tiny bit of fluff, with a dash of projecting my issues onto Britta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:42:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23704063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dearzoemurphy/pseuds/dearzoemurphy
Summary: Britta and Jeff spiral after the departure of Annie and Abed, so they have a conversation about it.Set post-finale.
Relationships: Britta Perry/Jeff Winger
Comments: 12
Kudos: 54





	i’ve heard stranger things

**Author's Note:**

> I started last night by writing a fun little fic where Annie, Abed, and Troy make matzo ball soup together. And yet, I ended up here. This is more self-indulgent than a lot of my works, but I still hope you all enjoy.

It didn’t take long for the emptiness to set in. Jeff and Britta were no strangers to losing friends, even before the study group began to splinter off. But after Pierce died, Troy left, and Shirley went to care for her dad, the fear of loneliness slowly started to consume them both. They knew that Annie and Abed wouldn’t spend their whole lives tied to Greendale. It was delusional to think that they would stay past their graduation date. And yet, they had held onto a small spark of hope that neither of them wanted to acknowledge.

It took Britta approximately three weeks after their departure to have a complete and total mental breakdown. Here were her younger, more successful friends, going out into the world to make something of themselves. And here she was, running a sandwich shop by day and tending bar by night. What had she accomplished in her 34 years on Earth? She’d raised some money for a few charities that probably skimmed off the top and didn’t do as much good as they promised. She’d dropped out of every school she’d ever attended. She’d taken vacations that she didn’t remember, rallied for causes she didn’t care about, and had a lot of barely memorable sex. At least one of those points wasn’t completely depressing.

When she was in the midst of her worst spiral yet, she called Jeff Winger, because of course she did. She hadn’t seen him in a week or so and needed him. He was the last one left. Sure, Chang and Frankie and Elroy and the Dean were still there. But all of them were only sort of her friends. Jeff was the one who had been there from the beginning and saw the whole thing through to the end.

It only took him ten minutes to get over to her apartment. Britta was sprawled out on the floor of her kitchen, half empty glass of wine in hand. One of her cats was crawling all over her, giving her concerned licks every so often. A knock at the door startled her, causing most of the wine to slosh over onto the floor.

“Coming! I’m…coming,” she called, scrambling up and stumbling towards the door. She flung it open and was greeted by the sight of her old friend.

“Jeff,” she breathed, launching forward and throwing her arms around him. He returned the embrace, one arm around her waist and the other raised to gently stroke her hair.

“Jeff, I think I’m having a meltdown. I just-”

“Shhh, let’s get inside first,” he suggested, guiding Britta inside and shutting the door behind him. She let him lead her over to the faded maroon couch in her living room. Next thing she knew, she was curled into Jeff Winger’s side, his jacket balled up in her fist.

“So…what’s going on?” he asked eventually.

“What am I doing with my life? What do I have to show for it, really? Troy is out in the world becoming a man with LeVar Burton, Shirley is living happily with her family, Abed is gonna become a famous movie producer, and Annie’s gonna work for the FBI. Even you’re a teacher! Where did I go wrong? What did I fuck up so badly that I don’t deserve anything more?” Britta choked out. Each word brought her closer to the brink of breaking out into full on sobs.

Jeff rubbed his thumb along the outside of her arm. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been asking myself the same questions since they left.”

Britta gave a humorless laugh. “Got any answers, then?”

He looked down at the woman curled up next to him. “No. Not yet,” he said, “but I know that you do deserve more. This is all you have right now. But you will get what you deserve eventually."

“You don’t really believe that,” she grumbled.

Jeff gave a dry smile. “No, I don’t. I don’t think the universe is even a little fair most of the time.”

“Do you have any idea of what you’re going to do?”

The brunet paused for a moment. “I think I’ve made a decision of sorts.”

“What kind of decision?” Britta asked, looking up to meet his gaze.

“I need to get out of Greendale.”

Britta felt as if all the air suddenly left the room. He had verbalized an idea she had dared to have for moments at a time, but tried not to pay too much mind.

“Really?”

“Really. You know, you could come with me,” Jeff proposed suddenly. 

Britta paused. “Where would we go?”

“I hadn’t gotten that far. I just…I know I can’t be here anymore. It hurts too much,” he admitted.

The blonde nodded in agreement. “There’s too many reminders. Of them and everything that I was supposed to be running from,” she said softly, as if speaking too loudly would break her.

“You know, they say they’ll call and keep in touch, but…” Jeff started. Britta looked up to see a small wave of tears coursing down his face. She wrapped her arms around his torso and buried her face into his shoulder so that he wouldn’t see the rivers starting to run down her cheeks. Jeff tried to take a breath to calm down, but it only resulted in him beginning to audibly cry. Britta pressed her face further into him so that she wouldn’t do the same.

“We should go somewhere far away from here. Somewhere on the coast,” Jeff suggested after a few minutes, his tears finally subsiding.

Britta moved away for a second to grab a tissue box from her coffee table, which she offered to him. “The coast would be nice. I like the ocean.”

He took a tissue and dabbed at his eyes. “East or West?” he asked with a laugh.

“West is closer. It would be cheaper to move everything.”

“What if we started over?”

“Isn’t that the idea?”

“No, I mean completely start over. Only bring what we can fit in a bag,” Jeff suggested.

Britta fought back a smile. “You’d regret that the minute we got there.”

Jeff rolled his eyes. “You’re right.”

The pair sat in silence for a moment, arms still wrapped around each other. Breaths in and breaths out quickly became in sync. Britta let her mind wander for a moment as she was holding Jeff and ended up in a particularly dark place.

“Jeff?”

“Yes?”

“Do you think I’m the worst?”

He turned to look at Britta.

“What do you mean by that?” he asked.

Britta shrugged and let her head rest on Jeff’s shoulder. “I don’t really know. You and the study group always said it. Whenever I got something wrong, whenever I ‘Britta’d’ something, when I declared my major…I couldn’t ever do anything right, in the group’s eyes,” she elaborated.

“We only gave you shit because we knew you could take it. We loved you, and I know you know that. But every friend group chooses one person to be the lightning rod, to absorb the teasing and frustration. They don’t consciously mean to, they just choose the strongest among them,” Jeff replied.

“Even lightning rods get tired after a while. And want to hear that they’re loved and appreciated,” Britta said quietly, feeling as if she were about to start crying again. She buried her head into Jeff’s shoulder again in preparation.

“Hey, hey. Listen here,” he said, reaching over to lift her chin up with one finger and look her in the eye, “You’re not the worst. You’re Britta Perry, full of enthusiasm and passion. You’ve got the biggest heart of anyone I know. All you want to do is help people. It’s scientifically impossible for you to be the worst.”

Britta’s bottom lip trembled as she looked into Jeff’s eyes. “I know. But after hearing it nonstop for four years from people you care about, one tends to internalize it,” she said, more malice in her voice than she intended there to be.

“Hey, well-”

“And then I was proved right. Like I said earlier, I’m the only one of the group without a degree or a job or any kind of future. Troy’s got Hawthorne Wipes, Shirley’s got the sandwich place, Abed’s got movies, Annie’s got detective work, you have a real job! With a pension! And I’ve got, what, running the sandwich place while Shirley takes a step back? Wearing progressively shorter shorts to see if it will get me more tips? And you. The only person I have left is you,” Britta continued. Her whole body started to shake.

“That’s not true. Elroy, Frankie, Chang, Craig…they’re all right here. And Troy and all of them aren’t gone forever. They’ll come back and visit eventually,” Jeff reasoned.

“I want to live for more than a few days a year! I want to feel _something_ that's not this...this emptiness," she said. Jeff was unsure of how to reply, giving her a chance to come to a definitive conclusion. 

"I…I want to move to a small town in California. With you,” she added confidently.

Jeff decided to humor the change in conversation. “Sure. We could get a small condo together. One with two bedrooms and one bathroom so that we would have to fight over who got to shower first in the morning.”

The corners of Britta's mouth twitched upwards. “We’d have to argue about what hand soap to buy.”

“We could get jobs that didn’t make us want to kill ourselves.”

“We could have movie nights in and nights where we went out to try local restaurants.”

“I could start taking surf lessons.”

“I could take up gardening.”

“And at the end of the day, we would still have each other. Maybe that could be enough,” Jeff said, squeezing Britta tighter.

“Isn’t that what we’ve always had?” she asked innocently. She looked up again, this time, studying the lines on his face. The wrinkles at the center of his forehead, the faint dimples at the corners of his mouth, the shape of his jawline. He looked surprised for a moment before answering.

“I suppose it is. Even when everyone else left us…”

“We're still here.”

Britta nestled back into Jeff, feeling far more content than she had in weeks.

“Thanks for coming over. I was just…freaking out,” she said.

Jeff leaned down to plant a kiss on the top of her head. “Don’t mention it. I have been too. It’s felt so…”

“...empty.”

“Yeah. That’s definitely the word for it,” Jeff said.

They held each other, instinctively knowing that they would weather every storm that was yet to come at them together. In all their years at Greendale, their bond had been the one that never broke. No matter how confusing or infuriating or uncomfortable the circumstances had been, they never gave up on each other. And there was ample comfort to be found in that fact.

“Should we start researching towns on the coast?” Jeff asked eventually, pulling out his phone to look up a map.

Britta smiled broadly. “Of course,” she responded, moving herself upwards to kiss his jaw lightly.

Without putting any thought into it at all, Jeff leaned down to meet her lips. They shared a tender kiss as if it were a second nature, something mundane that they needed to survive.

Britta was stunned for a moment, but quickly regained her composure. “We don’t need to talk about this, right?”

“Not tonight, at least. How do you feel about La Jolla? My family took a trip there once when I was a kid, I remember loving it,” Jeff replied. 

Britta smiled and nodded, tucking herself as close to Jeff as she possibly could. In some strange way, part of the emptiness dissipated. They had both lost so much over the course of their lives. And yet, here they were, and they had each other.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, please leave any thoughts, comments, etc down below! I will finish the cute little cooking fic eventually, but this just,, consumed me last night.


End file.
